It is often necessary to document the correspondence between two differing curriculums, or between a curriculum and a set of standards. This process is generally referred to as “cross-walking” a curriculum, although many other terms such as curriculum analysis, gap analysis, et al., are also used.
In the present discussion, the term “curriculum” or “curricula” can be taken to include any set of educational standards, items in a course, or other terms used to describe the content or materials contained in a course. The goal is to establish a correspondence between the items in the two curricula, or between a curriculum and a set of standards such as a curriculum framework.
By way of example, the purpose might be to demonstrate that one method of teaching the material accomplishes the same goals as another, to establish equivalency of courses between institutions. In the alternative, it might be necessary to document a correspondence between a curriculum and a set of standards to justify additional governmental funding for a course. The curriculum cross-walk can also be used to demonstrate that the curriculum of a text book covers all of the mandated course material for a curriculum, or set of standards. It is thereby possible to demonstrate that a different curriculum addresses the same material as the alternative curriculum or as required by the set of standards.
The process of establishing this correspondence between the two curricula, or of establishing a correspondence of a curriculum to standards, is labor intensive. It is tedious to establish all of the relationships between the two sets of items.
One can envision the process of cross-walking two curricula, or a curriculum to a set of standards, as a large matrix. There is a row for each item in the first curriculum, and a column for each item in the second curriculum or standards, as illustrated in FIG. 1. The process of determining a correspondence between one or more items can be likened to putting an “x” at the intersection of the respective row and column to establish the correspondence of the two curriculum items. In this way, an item from the first curriculum can be identified as corresponding to one or any number of items in the second curriculum. Similarly, any item in the second curriculum or standard can be identified as corresponding to any number of items from the first curriculum. To thoroughly “cross-walk” the two curricula, it is necessary to traverse the entire matrix, considering all possible combinations of rows and columns to determine which items from the first curriculum correspond to items from the second curriculum and vice versa.
This process has been made more manageable by the creation of computer software which presents the curriculum items in list form for review and selection by the user, as shown in FIG. 2. For example, previous versions of CTESTAR®, available from Enthusiastic Software of Benton Harbor, Mich., and commonly owned with the present application, automate the process in this manner.
The problem with the matrix approach, and its corresponding list, is that the number of combinations of items from the two sets grows as a product of the number of line items in each curriculum or set of standards. If the first curriculum has 100 items, and the second has 75 items, the number of considerations that must be done is 75 times 100, or 7,500 considerations. If the second curriculum or standard set doubles to 150 items, the number of considerations also doubles, to 15,000. It would be advantageous to provide a system or method that relieves the user of the burden of considering each possible combination of relationships, and which also ensures that relevant combinations are not overlooked.
The present invention makes this process easier, reducing the time required to complete the task, and improving the thoroughness of the completed task. The system according to the invention reduces the number of considerations that must be made in two ways: by dividing one, or both, of the curricula (or standard sets) into subsets based upon the type of material or any other criteria, and by filtering of the resulting subset based upon keywords, regular expressions, or any other arbitrary set of rules. The user of the program specifies the subset or subsets they are interested in, and also specifies terms to further reduce the number of items which must be considered.